Yemeni army forces have shot down an American AeroVironment RQ-20 Puma drone flying in the skies over Saudi Arabia’s southern Jizan region close to the border with Yemen.
Spokesman for Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree said in a tweet that air defense units targeted the aircraft operated by the Saudi military during its reconnaissance mission on Thursday evening.
The media bureau of Yemen’s Operations Command Center is going to release the video footage of the operation within the next few hours, he added.
The Air Defenses shot down a U.S.-made spy planeRQ_20 belongning to the Saudi Air Force while carrying out hostile missions in the airspace of the Jizan front.The targeting was carried out with an appropriate weapon and scenes of the wreckage will be broadcast in the coming hours
— Yahya Sare'e (@Yahya_Saree) October 7, 2021
The development came a day after Saree said Yemeni forces and their allies had shot down a Saudi spy drone as it was flying in the skies over al-Jubah district in Yemen’s central province of Ma’rib.
Saree identified the downed aircraft as a Chinese-made CH-4 unmanned aerial vehicle.
Yemeni air defense forces and their allies also shot down a US-built Boeing Insitu ScanEagle spy drone drone with a precision missile on September 27.
The spokesman for the Yemeni armed forces said at the time the aircraft was struck as it was on a surveillance mission over the Medghal district of Ma’rib province.
On Thursday, a young man and a teenager sustained injuries when a mortar shell fired by Saudi mercenaries struck a residential area in Wadi Nakhlah area, which lies east of Hays district in Yemen’s western coastal province of Hudaydah.
Houthi warns of enemies’ conspiracies
The leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement said Thursday the enemies are hatching conspiracies against the entire Muslim world, stressing the need for marking religious events in order to thwart such plots.
“The importance of marking religious occasions is due to the fact that the entire Muslim Ummah is currently facing numerous challenges and threats. The observance of these ceremonies comes at a time when the enemies are trying to create divisions in the Muslim world through mischievous acts,” Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said during a televised speech from the Yemeni capital city of Sana’a.
He added, “The enemies of the Muslim world have concentrated all their efforts on opening up rifts within the ummah, and distancing them from the path of the Messenger of God (Prophet Muhammad) and the Holy Qur'an.”
Saudi Arabia, backed by the US and regional allies, launched a war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing popular Ansarullah resistance movement.
The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead, and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases.
Yemeni armed forces and allied Popular Committees, however, have grown steadily in strength against the Saudi-led invaders, and left Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the country.